“Of course we’re here.” Minerva adjusted her spectacles. “Colin was invited to a party. He’s not going to fail to appear.”
Colin was invited? That must have been Piers’s doing. He’d asked the Parkhursts to invite her family. So they’d be present for the announcement of the betrothal. Thoughtful of him, that.
“We decided to make it a family trip.” Diana glanced at Minerva. “We thought you might need us.”
“I do. I need you desperately.” Charlotte pulled them into the room. They all settled onto the bed. “I seem to have found myself betrothed to a wealthy, handsome, unfeeling marquess.”
Diana smiled. “And what’s wrong with him, precisely?”
“Aside from him being everything that Mama would want, of course,” Minerva said.
Charlotte sniffed. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
Minerva plucked a biscuit from her untouched tea tray. “Try the beginning, then.”
So she did. She told them everything. Or rather, nearly everything. She didn’t betray any hint of Piers’s secret work, of course, and she was purposely vague about any episodes that involved clothing removal. As she related the episodes of the locked room and Lady the Demonic Mare, her sisters laughed.
Four biscuits and one tearstained handkerchief later, Charlotte finally came to the end. “And then he told me I needed to grow up.”
“He didn’t,” Diana said. Her gasp of shock and dismay gave Charlotte some cold satisfaction.
“He’s so walled off, so stubborn. The man doesn’t know the slightest thing about love.”
Minerva smiled. “As opposed to . . . you?”
Her older sisters exchanged a look. A how-sweet-she-sounds look.
Charlotte found it maddening. “I know it must sound ridiculous. He’s a worldly, educated peer, and I’m young and inexperienced. But when it comes to emotion, I’m leagues ahead.”
“Men can be taught,” Minerva said. “Even the worst-behaved ones, like Colin.”
“And if I’ll be forgiven for saying it,” Diana added, “you may have some things to learn, too. I know I did.” She squeezed Charlotte’s hand. “Do you love him?”
“Yes.” She sighed. “But I told him that, and he still betrayed me to force my hand.”
“Well, there’s the problem,” Minerva said. “You told him you love him. That doesn’t mean he believed it. Most likely, in some desperate, shortsighted, arsonist way, he meant to test you. It would be just like a man.”
“Perhaps.”
If it had been a test, Charlotte had failed it. He’d revealed his deepest, most shameful secret, and she’d received it with cold indifference. Despite all her promises to wait him out, knock down his walls . . . she’d walked away.
“I do think he cares for me. When he can get out of his own way, he’s so tender and passionate. But maybe I am too young. Maybe it is too fast. If we marry like this, it will be for all the wrong reasons.”
“I’d like to know who marries for the right ones,” Minerva said. “I all but kidnapped Colin, and we were nearly to Scotland before he gave in.”
“And there’s a reason the twins were born less than eight months after I married Aaron,” Diana said. “Sometimes love unfolds gradually. But more often than not, life hurries it along.”
Charlotte smiled a little, and it eased the knot strangling her heart. Her sisters were the best medicine.
Still, she picked at the edge of her handkerchief. “I’m just afraid.”
“Of what, dear?”
“Of becoming Mama.”
There it was, out in the open at last.
“I’m not a scholar like you, Min. Or as patient as you, Diana. If I marry without love, with little experience of the world and nothing to occupy my time . . . What will prevent me from becoming a ridiculous woman with a nervous condition?”
Minerva looked to Diana, and they shared another of those older-sister looks. “Should we tell her?”
“I think we should,” Diana replied.
“Tell me what?”
“You will become Mama,” Minerva said flatly. “It’s inevitable. Once babies come along, you don’t even have a choice.”
“It’s true.” Diana sighed. “All the things I swore I’d never do, never say . . .” She buried her face in her hands. “The other day I told Aaron to consider my nerves.”
Minerva rose from the bed and went to her traveling satchel. “Do you want to know what’s even worse?” She reached into the bag and withdrew her evidence. “I’ve started carrying a fan.”
“Oh dear.” Charlotte laughed.
Diana gave her a smile. “The truth of it is, it’s only now that we can fully understand. Mama loves us, and in her own, misguided way she tried to secure us the best possible future she could imagine.”
“I know,” Charlotte said. “And we didn’t give her an easy time of it, either.”
“At least we will not have such a narrow idea of what our daughters’ futures can be,” Minerva said, returning to the bed. “Colin and I have already started putting aside money for Ada’s university education.”
“University? But there aren’t any colleges that admit women.”
“Not yet. But we have some time to change that, don’t we? If it comes to it, we’ll build our own.”
“And if Ada doesn’t wish to go to university?”
Minerva looked at her over her spectacles. “Don’t be absurd. Of course she will want to go to university.”
Charlotte had a mental image of Min storming the gates of Oxford and demanding a college for women—with Ada standing several paces distant, cringing behind her hand.
Perhaps every generation of Highwood women was destined to be an embarrassment to their daughters. If it happened to Charlotte, at least she wouldn’t be alone.
“If you don’t want to marry this marquess, you don’t need to,” Minerva assured her. “You’ll always have a home with us. Once things are smoothed over and the gossip is forgotten, you can start afresh, pursue the future you want for yourself.”
“Scandal’s like a fire,” Diana added. “It only burns so long as you give it fuel.”